Owning Virtual Worlds For Fun and Profit 82
Trailrunner7 writes "Threatpost has a guest column by security researcher Charlie Miller on the ways in which attackers can easily take advantage of vulnerabilities in virtual worlds and perhaps online games to get control of other players' characters and avatars and even cash out their real-world bank accounts. From the article: 'It turns out that Second Life uses QuickTime Player to process its multimedia. When I started looking into virtual world exploits, with the help of Dino Dai Zovi, there was a stack buffer overflow in QuickTime Player that had been discovered by Krystian Kloskowski but had not yet been patched. In Second Life it is possible to embed images and video onto objects. We embedded a vulnerable file onto a small pink cube and placed it onto a [tract] of land we owned. No matter where the cube was, if a victim walked onto the land and had multimedia enabled (recommended but not required), they would be exploited. The cube could be inside a building, hovering in the air, or even under the ground, and the result was the same.'"
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funny, but unlike a normal MMO, Second Life's virtual money is purchased with real money by design. And there have already been property-rights lawsuits over virtual land and items within second life.
what about the IRS and profit? IP rights are one t (Score:3, Interesting)
what about the IRS and profit? IP rights are one thing but you still own the tax on them.
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They don't care what you bought and sold, they want to know you did it and how much you made from it.
Then they want you to add that to your AGI and pay tax on it.
If you buy a virtual item for real money, then sell it for more real money, you are legally required to report the difference as income to the IRS.
Bartering virtual items (gold, swords, etc.) for each other is no different. You take the value you got for it, subtract the value you originally paid for it, and that's your income from the trade, whic
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to expand on what I said above, I don't think that's going to happen. What is the point of going after taxes on purchases which most likely average a couple bucks or less? The government would spend much more tracking and prosecuting people "evading" taxes than they would take in.
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Just two short years ago, "the fundamentals of the economy" were "strong," the housing market was on the rise and, according to bankers, would never stop rising, and people actually had money to spend (even if it was borrowed from Visa). I'd be surprise if the 2 women you're talking about are still selling $4,000 worth of hair drawings per month.
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As far as I know (disclaimer: I am not on second life) the tax is rolled into the currency exchange.
If you then buy stuff in game with it, you've already paid sales tax on it by buying the virtual currency, just as you don't have to pay some sort of value-acquisition tax when you get a new sword in WoW because that's part of the game that you paid (and were taxed) for with the monthly subscription fee.
My guess is that the few people making a profit off of selling things in second life (and I doubt there are
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That was a typo - I meant $1,000 lindens.
Regarding what you make, that's great, but if the exchange rate is still roughly 4 bucks to $1,000 lindens, then you're making 8-12 bucks an hour. Decent for playing a video game, yes, but hardly a living wage, especially since I doubt the virtual clubs provide employee health insurance ;)
At any rate, $360USD a quarter is nice for an individual who wants to buy a toy at Newegg, but from the government's perspective, they'd probably spend that just in employee wages i
So... (Score:3, Informative)
That's what keeps the industry running!
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So...we were just told that with every new application comes a new series of security flaws? That's what keeps the industry running!
Yup, and that's what keeps /. talking.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
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Aw crap guys, you got the Security Emo all depressed. Now's he gonna try to cut his wrists with a rusty Zip Disk.
Bad Internet! Bad!
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
I once coded for a free MMO and discovered a vulnerability in how they handled web autolinking -- you know, when you say something and it turns the text into a clickable link that will open in your web browser. At least for the unix client, they were handling it with popen (I forget how they did it for windows). Just the straight, raw, unmodified string. Talk about a huge freaking command injection target. :P But the people who ran the game were so hesitant to allow any security fixes out of fear that they might break something (yeah, I know... it drove me crazy). They just wanted me to keep coding the special effects system and not say a word of the flaw. It took me writing an exploit for it that would remove all of the files in the user's home directory (or the whole system if they ran the game as root) before they reluctantly agreed to let me patch it. And the exploit was so simple -- all you had to do was to say a particular malformed URL, it'd appear as an innocent link, and anyone who clicked it would be wiped.
They *wouldn't* let me patch lesser security issues, such as those that would actually verify that data being sent back and forth was from who it said it was, to avoid a man-in-the-middle attack. They were purely reliant on the TCP stream; that was their only "security". And they did nothing to maintain a secure channel to prevent sniffing.
Be careful with what you run on your system. :P
Much more innocently, the first thing I ever did along these lines was back in the mid/late '90s and had to do with the MUD client zMud. It had an obscure feature that would let muds embed sound effects; if the mud output a particular string, it'd interpret part of it as a path to a sound file. So I had fun SHOUTing those commands with the path to windows system sounds included and making everyone's computer who used zMud start making noise ;) That was, until I got scolded by a wizard...
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I love technology. You made people's computers burst into noise thousands of miles away, and were repremanded by a sorceror. What a great time to be alive.
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I once coded for a free MMO
This wouldn't happen to be the MMO wherein there is a lot of Entropy, if you know what I mean?
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Bingo. ;)
P.S. -- Some of the best special effects I coded were never used. :P But they're still sitting around in the code base, supported by the client -- they just never got added to any maps. For example, blowing 3d leaves that accumulate around objects, then swirl away.
It's a content browser. (Score:4, Insightful)
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He doesn't really explain, but he says that he used the shell access that the QuickTime exploit gave him to inject code into the main event loop of the Second Life client. I too would be really interested in knowing how he managed to patch the binary on the fly.
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Now, what would be useful and unique - stealing the user's stuff by infecting the client or MITMing the connection at the client machine (between the client software and the network card.)
Was doable once upon a time, if you had the ability to fake source IP addresses on packets and a bit of patience (or alternatively knew a clever trick to make the server treat you as a trusted part of the Second Life grid). Both issues have now been fixed, but there may be others. Didn't even need to compromise the client.
Malicious file embedded inside a virtual world? (Score:3, Insightful)
SecondLife didn’t balk when they embedded a malformed QuickTime media file on their pink cube?
Even 4chan scans .jpeg files for embedded RAR archives... how hard is it to figure out that a QuickTime file’s structure is invalid?
Re:Malicious file embedded inside a virtual world? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah. I almost self-replied to that effect, but I figured somebody else would. Thanks...
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A wretched hive of scum and villainy!
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Keep in mind that Obi-Wan said "you will never find a more wretched hive of scum an villany." That implies that there is more than one such hive.
The GP called Second Life the Mos Eisley of Gaming. You will never find a game world that is a more wretched hive yada yada. That doesn't preclude 4chan being the Mos Eisley of the Whole Damned Internet.
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Yes, but to put the credit where the credit belongs, I directly implied it before he explicitly stated it.
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Why would you verify an entire file structure instead of just checking that the header looks right?
Transcoding perhaps? Every video site I’ve ever uploaded to transcoded the video...
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Even 4chan scans .jpeg files for embedded RAR archives... how hard is it to figure out that a QuickTime file’s structure is invalid?
Well fine, but that is a specific check for a known attack. How to you scan for all the unknown attacks?
Because that's not how it works. (Score:5, Informative)
It is just a URL that you enter into a field in the in-world parcel data. The simulator hands it to the viewer (client/browser) and tells it to play that and put it onto a texture that is drawn on a 3D surface. The viewer hands the URL to Quickslime, which then plays it. SL's backend never sees the video file/data, as it is directly downloaded from the target host specified in the URL.
I supposed you could argue why don't they run some kind of scanner on the URL before allowing it to be posted. Of course, that is pointless for any number of reasons, including:
1) There is no scanner to check all possible video formats that Quickslime plays, nor one which is foolproof in terms of detecting vulnerabilities.
2) Since the file/data is not hosted by Linden Lab, a single scan would be useless, as an attacker could put up a valid file, run the scan, then replace the file with a malicious one anytime afterwards.
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As long as the data is being transferred from one client to another without any intermediation on the part of Linden Labs, vulnerabilities like this will continue to exist. The solution is to have all data exchange pass through Linden Labs' servers. Of course, whether this is feasible in terms of bandwidth is an entirely different matter.
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It isn't feasible, and it isn't the direction or intention of Linden Lab to host such content going forward.
For many years now, they have been approaching their viewer design as a "browser", potentially adding the ability to pull assets (textures, sounds, animations, etc) via http from any source. That's sort of what their newest feature "html-on-a-prim" or "media-on-a-prim" is all about; the beginning of a move towards that. It is a good idea, as it allows for the same decentralization of asset services wh
Heh... (Score:1, Interesting)
You're thinking too small and short term...
The skys the limit once you gain a foothold on the users machine.
You can do ALOT if you don't do anything too noticable or damaging or too much at once.
And many people play games from their work machines. Or from the inside of their 'secure network'.
Can we shut up about SL please? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, the media seems to have a massive hard on for Second Life because they think it is the way the Internet ought to go. In reality Second Life is a pretty sub standard MMO with very few players. Why the hell do the fluff stories about it make Slashdot front page news?
Goes double since it sounds like this problem is fairly unique to SL. If you start seeing this in WoW and Aeon and EVE and so on then that's a story. However this is just a case of a poor excuse for an MMO having poor security. This would be the same as posting "Hey, Cadence SBP 16.3 have a security vulnerability and you need to upgrade to 16.3.014!" Nobody gives a shit, at least not enough people for it to be worth front page Slashdot. I understand if there's a security issue in a major OS, or an app that is widely used but in SL? Who cares? Not enough people to make it /. worthy I'd think.
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Not only that the exploit is 2 years old.. There is no mention of anything thats recent in the article.. Quite the pointless article.
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Think of SL as an awesome 3D chatroom with complete creative power given to its user.
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SL also inspired a whole episode of CSI:New York
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Seriously, the media seems to have a massive hard on for Second Life...
So does the entire populous of Second Life as well, from what I am told.
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Uh... Second Life is mostly dead these days. Everyone's moved to Facebook. Even companies which were racing to setup SL storefronts are abandoning them in droves after it turns out ROI isn't there and it's just costing money. When the r
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Who would care about the games you mentioned? (Although you can play games in SL, the majority of the worldwide users are not "players".) I generate hundreds of dollars annually from my activities in SL, I know others who earn their entire salaries there.
I've never even seen the games you listed, and if there were similar problems with them, I bet a fraction of the people would be affected compared to Second Life.
That being said, I don't presume that similar information shouldn't be shared--in an informat
Once again Linux not vulnerable (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Once again Linux not vulnerable (Score:5, Funny)
The safest airplane is the one that never leaves the ground.
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Obviously you've never seen Die Hard 2.
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The first exploit that prevents is the installing of Quicktime.
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small pink cubes are always problematic (Score:5, Funny)
I thought we already knew that.
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*Huge* tracts of land....
Today's internal Linden Lab discussion... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's what happened in one of Linden Lab's internal IRC channel today...
[16:42] [Linden001] hey, we made slashdot: http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/08/18/2154207/Owning-Virtual-Worlds-For-Fun-and-Profit [slashdot.org]
[16:45] [Linden002] fascinating.
[17:11] [Linden003] besides, we enforced the patched version of QuickTime to close this exploit.
[17:12] [Linden003] there is no mention of that in the article either.
[17:14] [Linden003] he's writing about ancient history here (2007) -- it must be slow in the internet security guru business.
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of course thanks to the new SL 2.0 feature of Media On A Prim there can be a huge new set of exploits
(unless they lock down the builtin browser (webkit based))
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Of course, the QuickTime exploit was one of the few Second Life exploits that was actually made public. For example, I had a T-Shirt that would open a remotely-accessible command shell on the wearer's PC in older Second Life client versions (that are no longer in use anywhere). Quietly patched in a new release that was made mandatory a few days later.
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[17:14] [Linden003] he's writing about ancient history here (2007) -- it must be slow in the internet security guru business.
Windows users can easily be crashed using this still, but I don't know if it can be used to execute code etc.
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You know had the Author of TFA used an unpatched exploit as an example there would have been all sorts of clamor about not giving Linden Labs time to patch it. The article itself was on the subject of this attack vector, not this specific vulnerability. Let's not turn Slashdot into a bashing competition, shall we?
Another Solution to This Problem?? (Score:3, Interesting)
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> if there were a decent, free (as in beer) disassembler out there.
Define decent? :-) You mean interactive?
Hiew or something here doesn't fit the bill ?
http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/disassemblers.shtml [thefreecountry.com]
(Granted, hiew isn't open-source, and technically a hex editor, but it is good.)
Why not clone IDA Pro and OllyDbg ?
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A clone of IDA Pro (as in interactive disassembly) with a somewhat intuitive interface would be a good start, although I'm not really sure one would ever say any interactive-disassembler could be intuitive :D. As far as HIEW or any other hex editor goes, I'll just say that u can only go "so far" with a hex editor or something like Olly. We'd need something that could auto-disassemble known text and data segments (such as code generated via Visual Studio and known link libraries), leaving us with unknown are
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Shades of Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash... (Score:2, Interesting)
[Victim] Oh! Shiny!
*Victim is now a drooling idiot*
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First Snow Crash reference is waaaay down the page. This is bloody shameful, Slashdot! >:(
I think the exact same attack could work in SL, except you're pwning the client machine instead of the user's brain.
Well I guess you could try to crash the user's brain once you have control of their machine, by running a high-speed horror slideshow of shock images in fullscreen.
Second Life is irrelevant (Score:3, Interesting)
A small, insignificant niche game that practically nobody plays. For some reason, the press loves it though.
Very easy to crash windows quicktime with images (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothing new (Score:2)